Over Memorial Day weekend, I was part of a team representing Dissent in a debate with two editors from American Affairs, a new journal that hadgainednotoriety as an intellectual home for Trumpism. Now, with Labor Day still a few weeks away, Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs, has announced in the New York Times that he no longer supports Trump. Some reactions to the piece have been admiring. (Peter Beinart, who has experience making enormous mistakes in public, called it a “genuinely admirable mea culpa.”) Others have been less approving. (“Fuck absolutely everything about this guy,” tweeted Spencer Ackerman.)

Tempting as schadenfreude can be, the explanation Krein gives for his change of heart is more interesting—and more important—than his personal story. At our debate with American Affairs, the argument turned on whether the breakdown of a bipartisan consensus on the inevitability of globalization and the magic of markets had made possible new alliances between left and right. The American Affairs position was, emphatically, yes. Whatever our differences, we had a common enemy: untrammeled global capitalism. In the age of Trump, they contended, populists of all ideological persuasions could launch a multi-front war against a neoliberal establishment in the name of a renewed economic nationalism.

TeamDissent was more skeptical. Donald Trump’s campaign hadn’t been a simple exercise in economic nationalism—it was also a demonstration of white nationalism. There were good reasons for that. In the United States, racial identity and national identity have been linked from the start. That doesn’t mean every invocation of the nation is inherently racist—last summer’s Democratic National Convention was a festival of multiracial nationalism—but it does provide a historical backdrop to our contemporary politics that can’t be ignored.

Following last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Krein seems to be coming around to our point of view. Trump supporters who dismissed his pandering to white nationalism, he writes, “were deluding ourselves.” Although Trump has always claimed to speak for the nation as a whole, he has only managed to “inflame the most vicious forces of division within our country,” empowering the racist right and undermining the right-wing populism that Krein wants to advance.

Steve Bannon might be having similar thoughts today. Speaking with American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner earlier this week, Bannon made his own case for an unlikely ideological partnership. As Kuttner explained it, Bannon hoped “to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right.”

Like the American Affairs team earlier this summer, Bannon was quick to dismiss the white nationalists who have lately gained so much attention. “It’s a fringe element,” he said. If the Democrats were smart, he added, they would realize that soon. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

If Bannon were right, then Trump would be well on his way to forging a coalition of the working class that would transform American politics. That, Bannon insists—at least in interviews with the mainstream press—was always his real goal. “If we deliver,” he said after Trump’s victory in November, “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.” Today, Trump’s approval rating is lower than any president’s at this point in a first term and Bannon is out of a job.

Critics of Trump and Bannon have been drawn to a straightforward account for their failure. According to Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, the problem can be boiled down to one word: race. “Bannon has become just the latest American political figure to dream of a class-based politics,” Smith writes, “and then to founder on the thing that really makes American politics exceptional: its deep racial divisions.” The United States has never developed a proper social democratic party because in this country “race has trumped class”—always.

The pessimism of Smith’s assertion sounds like wisdom—except that, like all sweeping declarations about history that turns on just one variable, it’s a radical oversimplification of the case. Scholars and activists alike have been debating the issue at least since 1906, when German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked, “why is there no socialism in the United States?” The racial diversity of the American working class has been one popular answer—but so has the success of American capitalism; the absence of feudalism; the importance of federalism; the size of the country; the early arrival of universal white male suffrage; the multiple veto points built into the national government; the durability of the two-party system; the prospect that Americans born on the bottom rung of the social ladder could, every once in a while, climb to the top; and the brutality of the repression dealt out to American socialists (who did exist, even if not in sufficient numbers to take over a major party).

The historian Eric Foner has offered a more plausible answer that grants all of these factors a potential role but reaches for a deeper interpretation. “[M]ass politics, mass culture, and mass consumption came to America before it did to Europe,” Foner observed in a classic 1984 essay. This conjunction meant that “American socialists were the first to face the dilemma of how to define socialist politics in a capitalist democracy.”

Today, a new generation of American socialists is grappling with the same question. To arrive at a better answer than our predecessor, we have to start by recognizing the force behind the racial fatalism that drives Smith’s grim diagnosis—and then we have to move beyond it. The notion that racism is an original sin that dooms any attempt at class politics is the Trump era’s version of the equally shortsighted conviction from the Obama years that the United States had entered a postracial age.

Race is not some timeless fact of American life. Like everything else that matters in social life, race has a history. Racial identities have shifted over time, and so has the power of appeals to racism. Multiracial coalitions underpinned the New Deal and the Great Society—and they also put Barack Obama in the White House. America’s legacy of racial oppression is a burden we all carry, but it is not a death sentence. Nor are race and class isolated from each other in vacuum-sealed containers, as too much of the discussion around these subjects continues to pretend.

These issues have been on my mind lately, and not just because of Charlottesville. A few weeks ago, I became a father. If demographic predictions are accurate, the United States will become a majority-minority country before my son turns thirty. He’ll be one of the reasons for that shift. I’m white. My wife, whose family comes from South India, isn’t. By the racial calculus white nationalists would impose on us, that makes me a race traitor, and my son a loss for the home team.

Back in the debate with American Affairs, I said that the greatest challenge facing my generation is building a decently egalitarian, multiracial democracy, ideally without incinerating the planet. Unlike the American Affairs romance with Trump, that belief has been strong enough to make it through the summer. A majority-minority country is a country where elections can’t be won by pandering to white racism—and it might be one where radicals with a capacious enough political vision can overcome the divisions that have been used to separate us. History gives ample reason to doubt that we’ll be able to pull it off. But when I look at my son’s face I’m reminded of something more powerful than the weight of the past: the possibility of something new.

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Far from being white enclaves, today’s suburbs are rapidly diversifying—and reshaping the U.S. political map in the process. Above, a 2011 rally to mobilize low-income voters in Suffolk County (Long Island), New York. Courtesy of Long Island Wins.

Uruguay’s federation of mutual-aid cooperatives, FUCVAM, is home to some 90,000 people in housing new (left) and old (right). Photo by Jerónimo Díaz.

Chinese flags wave in front of Hantängri Mosque in the Nanmen neighborhood of Ürümchi (Timothy Grose)

A Project Beauty poster that was posted throughout the Uyghur neighborhoods of Ürümchi at the beginning of the People’s War on Terror. The posters were often accompanied by notices that rewards of up to 100,000 yuan would be given to those who reported unauthorized religious practice to the police. (Photo by Timothy Grose, translation by Darren Byler)

(Infographic by Darren Byler and Timothy Grose)

A map of “convenience police stations” in the center of the Uyghur district in Ürümchi (Darren Byler, with Google Earth)

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the black homeownership rate dropped to its lowest point since at least the 1980s, and the wealth gap between black and white Americans spiked. Above, Washington, D.C. resident DeAngelo McDonald and his children outside their home, which faced foreclosure in 2010. Photo by Tracy A. Woodward/Washington Post via Getty Images.

La France Insoumise supporter at the March for the Sixth Republic, March 2017 (Geoffrey Froment / Flickr)

In its ruling in Shelby County, which overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts court revived the equal dignity of states argument that arose out of the long-disgraced Dred Scott decision. Image of Dred Scott courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Austin Frerick, who launched a bid for Iowa’s third congressional district on an antimonopoly platform, dropped out when party leaders made it clear that they preferred his better-funded opponents. Photo courtesy of Austin Frerick.

Early voting locations in the Indianapolis metro area in 2016, via IndyStar.

An Eritrean refugee in Khartoum. Photo by John Power.

Khartoum as seen from the river Nile. Photo by John Power.

Common migration routes from East Africa to Europe. Route information adapted from the International Organization for Migration, August 2015, by Colin Kinniburgh. Countries party to the Khartoum process are shaded in orange (note: not all shown on this map).

At the 1936 International Conference of Business Cycle Institutes, sponsored by the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, Vienna. Ludwig von Mises is seated in the center with mustache and cigarette. Gottfried Haberler also pictured, at right. (Source)

In 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat from Nebraska, ran for president on a fusion ticket with the Populist Party. This cartoonist from a Republican magazine thought the “Popocratic” ticket was too ideologically mismatched to win. Bryan did lose, but his campaign, the first of three he waged for the White House, transformed the Democrats into an anti-corporate, pro-labor party. Cartoon from Judge (1896) via Library of Congress

Sketch for a 1976 poster by the New York Wages for Housework Committee (MayDay Rooms / Creative Commons)

The Kurds

[W]hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. . . right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. Actually almost opposite to each other. —Dilar Dirik, “Rojava vs. the World,” February 2015

The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights.

Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both clan-based and patriarchal.

Turkey: For much of its modern history, Turkey has pursued a policy of forced assimilation towards its minority peoples; this policy is particularly stringent in the case of the Kurds—until recently referred to as the “mountain Turks”—who make up 20 percent of the total population. The policy has included forced population transfers; a ban on use of the Kurdish language, costume, music, festivals, and names; and extreme repression of any attempt at resistance. Large revolts were suppressed in 1925, 1930, and 1938, and the repression escalated with the formation of the PKK as a national liberation party, resulting in civil war in the Kurdish region from 1984 to 1999.

Syria: Kurds make up perhaps 15 percent of the population and live mostly in the northeastern part of Syria. In 1962, after Syria was declared an Arab republic, a large number of Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and declared aliens, which made it impossible for them to get an education, jobs, or any public benefits. Their land was given to Arabs. The PYD was founded in 2003 and immediately banned; its members were jailed and murdered, and a Kurdish uprising in Qamishli was met with severe military violence by the regime. When the uprising against Bashar al Assad began as part of the Arab Spring, Kurds participated, but after 2012, when they captured Kobani from the Syrian army, they withdrew most of their energy from the war against Assad in order to set up a liberated area. For this reason, some other parts of the Syrian resistance consider them Assad’s allies. The Kurds in turn cite examples of discrimination against them within the opposition.

Proclamation of the reclaiming of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes, November 1969 (National Parks Service)

Entrance to Alcatraz in 2008 (Babak Fakhamzadeh / Flickr)

Letter from the Indians of All Tribes to the National Council on Indian Opportunity, January 1970 (National Parks Service)

Sign on Alcatraz during occupation, 1969–60 (National Parks Service)

Members of the People’s Guard on motorcycles, 1920. Courtesy of Eric Lee.

Armed group of the Menshevik People’s Guard, 1920. Courtesy of Eric Lee.

Eleven-year-old Liza Greenberg, daughter of David and Suzanne Nossel. Photo by Todd Gitlin.

Protest against neoliberalism in Colombia, 2013

In a scene from HBO’s The Deuce, streetwalker Ruby presents an officer with a property voucher to avoid arrest. Courtesy of HBO.